Open Data — 3 success stories 2023
If you want to understand what open data is and what potential it has, it is worth learning about examples of using open data and success stories. Open data is the basis for the operation of any business based on data — it affects the development of the economy and increases human knowledge about the surrounding world. Discover 3 stories of the benefits of using open data.
Open data on examples
In the following parts of the article, you will read about 3 different projects that have successfully used open data:
- Application for farmers in Kenya iCow
- Application for the blind and visually impaired BlindSquare
- NASA open databases.
But first, a little introduction.
Open data — definition
What features must characterize data to let it be called open data? Open data is data that must be:
- Available — you do not have to apply for or ask for access to open data in any way, because they should be made available under an open license
- Free of charge — open data is data available to everyone at no charge
- Complete — open data is usually available in a large amount in its entirety, i.e. it is not a small fragment that does not give insight into the whole picture of the situation
- Structured — open data is structured, prepared for download in a format that allows for its automatic processing
Thanks to all these features, open data can be used by businesses to create services and applications that support the development of the economy and level out unequal opportunities for access to public information in countries like Kenya and modern business information solutions, such as the new Transparent Data product — Business Registers 360.
Open data in the iCow app — an ecosystem of services for African farmers
iCow is an integrated ecosystem of services and tools that uses Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to provide farmers in Kenya with information that supports their daily work. At the moment, over 1.6 million farmers in Kenya use the app.
The iCow app was created by Su Kahumbu to improve the welfare of small farmers in Kenya. The application system allows farmers to optimize their production systems using regenerative practices. Kahumbu, based on her experience and interactions with small farmers, recognized that in order to be successful, farmers need access to knowledge about good agricultural practices in animal and crop production. Therefore, she decided to develop a service that would allow farmers to access verified agricultural knowledge that is available from regional agricultural institutions.
How does the iCow app work? How open data helps?
Each farmer, after registering in the application, can enable the option of receiving SMS messages about breeding and livestock production patterns. This means that the users can have access to reliable open data even when they do not have access to the Internet. What’s more, in the application, farmers can monitor the condition of their pigs and make comments that may be potentially important to other farmers.
The application also allows users to search the application’s content library via SMS. The only thing the user has to do is send an SMS to the indicated number, and enter the key phrase that interests them. The iCow library consists of over 30,000 categories covering all practices of smallholder production systems, including livestock, crops, soils, insects, climate change, farmer health, trees and more.
BlindSquare — based on open data app for the blind persons
BlindSquare is a GPS application that was developed for blind, deaf-blind and visually impaired people by MIPsoft. The open data in this app comes from Open Street Maps and the Foursquare (Foursquare City Guide) app, where users can rate different places on the Canadian map and see where their friends are (as long as they have checked in to a certain place in the app).
According to the developers, BlindSquare is one of the most used applications for blind people in the world. The content on BlindSquare has so far been translated into over 25 languages. What is worth adding, the users of the application are involved in the translation of the content. For this reason, it is called a project that breaks boundaries.
RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) rolled out this app to 305 of its branches (about 25% of the Canadian network) to give blind and visually impaired customers more independence. The Canadian government estimates that at least 1.5 million Canadians identify with some form of vision loss, which can be a barrier to entering unfamiliar places such as shops, banks, new streets, etc.
How does the BlindSquare app work? How open data helps?
The application user receives voice notifications, e.g. about street names and nearby intersections, and how to get there. This is possible thanks to the combination of data obtained from Open Street Maps, enabled location on the smartphone and data from the Foursquare application. In the application, you can select the voice as well as speech rate and volume.
And how does NASA uses and collects open data?
NASA generates more than 12TB of data daily from nearly 100 currently active missions and thousands of sensors and systems on Earth and in space. NASA aggregates and processes data using several systems. All collected data is available on NASA’s official Open Data website.
To facilitate the search for interesting data, the user can use data visualization, thanks to which, after clicking on a given keyword, a list of available data records will appear:
As we have already mentioned, NASA collects open data through several systems. Data from the MPCS system (Mission Data Processing and Control System) obtained from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe were used, among others, during the last mission to Mars. They were used to guide the Curiosity rover during its real-time mission. However, this is not the only use of data collected in the MPCS system — NASA also uses open data from this system to generate custom data visualizations.
Another good example of a system that collects and uses open radio astronomy data is the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). This system consists of numerous telescopes located in South Africa and Australia that collect information about galaxies in their formation stages, the origin of the universe and other mysteries of the cosmos. Open data from this source is used to perform complex data analysis.
NASA also uses large datasets in the Pleiades supercomputer. The computer is used to analyze space shuttle designs or solar flare cases. The supercomputer was also used some time ago to evaluate information about stars that was collected by the Kepler space probe. Through this analysis, NASA has discovered Earth-sized planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
